


Back To Where We Started

by DoveHeart



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Because reverse chronology!, Gen, Reverse Chronology, Sad, Sad Ending, Spoilers for Sylvain and Felix non-Blue Lions paired ending, Which means sad beginning really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:00:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 11,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21684139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoveHeart/pseuds/DoveHeart
Summary: It ends with a sword on a doorstep.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	1. Horsebow Moon, 1220

**Author's Note:**

> Title stolen from Back to Where We Started by Aaron B. Thompson. Timeline is in chapter titles.
> 
> Ever since I learned about this ending I needed to know how they got there. Let's find out.

The morning is cold; the wind is blowing down from Sreng. Sylvain used to revel in how he could meet the cold face to face and not look away. He used to make fun of anyone who couldn't. Now he likes comfort. He's too old for boasting - well, he's still basically in his prime, he thinks indignantly, just with a more developed taste for pleasure. Even so, it isn't winter yet, and he'll take his turn around the grounds and let the wolfhounds out for a run. They trot behind him, plumed tails bouncing, claws scratting at the flagstones.

The border's quiet these days, and so is his life. He has little cause to visit Fhirdiad, much less Derdriu or the other great cities. It's a good sign.

His skin prickles and tightens when he opens the door and lets the wind in. Not howling, but definitely whining. Another year almost gone. Each one seems to be shorter than the last.

The dogs are out already, as soon as the door is open, with no heed for the cold.

Sylvain has almost followed them, and almost trodden on the sword laid on the ground at the doorstep.

He knows that sword. He's never seen it in his life but he knows it.

The hilt is worn, the binding black and dull with old sweat. The sheath is scratched and scuffed. But he knows that inside that battered sheath the blade is fine, because Felix only buys good steel and takes care of it better than anything else in his life.

Sylvain picks it up. Only a sword. No message, no sender, no hint of owner beyond the certainty of his gut feeling.

He shivers at the touch of it. He can't do anything but stare at it for a minute or so, knowing, _knowing_ what it means.

"Oh, Felix," he says to the sword, "this isn't how I wanted to find out."


	2. Blue Sea Moon, 1209 (III)

Sylvain catches Ingrid looking around as they make their way to the sun terrace for dinner.

"He's not here," he says at last as they emerge into the summer air. The table’s only set for two, and he hates to think of her disappointed. “I’m not going to spring him on you or anything, just so you know.”

“Oh.” Ingrid looks away. “I didn’t think-”

“I’m sorry. He left. I thought I could keep him here a little longer, but-”

“I’m sure he’s busy.”

“If you want to call it that.” Sylvain can’t help himself. It would have been so perfect if he’d just stayed long enough to meet Ingrid. She worries about him.

“What’s that voice for? Don't tell me you miss roaming around looking for bandits.”

They sit at the table and Ingrid helps herself immediately. Old habits, thinks Sylvain. They may be getting older, with accumulated titles and responsibilities and families, but they’re still the same people they always were. Faerghus, or the region of the united Fódlan which used to be Faerghus, seems more fertile in peacetime, somehow, though the weather hasn't changed from day to day and season to season. But when the summers are bad now there is always food from other regions coming in, stable shipments of grain and vegetables. Despite all this, Ingrid still eats as though she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from.

“What happened?” she asks around a mouthful of tart.

“Nothing,” says Sylvain easily. “The job ended, he left.”

“And he wouldn’t stay a few more days to see me?”

It breaks his heart how hurt she looks. “If he knew you were coming I’m sure he would have stayed.”

“Sylvain, you should have told him!”

“I was going to!”

Ingrid finishes the slice of tart and reaches for a quail leg. “Did something happen?” she asks. “You have that look on your face, like you’re ashamed of something. Tell me what you're hiding."

"I'm not hiding anything."

"How is he?" she presses. "Just be honest with me, Sylvain, I want to know. I worry."

"I know you worry."

"Then tell me. Did he seem okay? Is he struggling?"

Sylvain runs his fingers through his hair. "Nothing like that. He was fine. The life suits him."

"Are you sure? He can't keep this up forever. At his age-"

"Come on, what am I supposed to say? He wasn't even here a month, and that's the first I've seen of him in years. He'll do it till he can't, and then… I don't know what he'll do." Against his better judgement he looks at her, at those pleading green eyes. "Don't give me that, Ingrid, I'm not his keeper. At this point I don't even know if I'm his friend. We've been distant longer than we were ever close."

"Don't say that."

"It's true."

"Don't say it like those years meant nothing. They were important. To him too."

"I just don't know what to say to him sometimes," he says, slicing cheese and waving away the little flies hovering over the table. "I feel like if we were really as good friends as I've always thought we were, I'd know what to say to him."

"Most of the time he doesn't need you to say anything." She reaches over his plate and spears a slice of cheese on her knife.

"Exactly, and I never know when to say nothing either."

Ingrid pauses and looks him in the eye. That steely look. Then she takes a bite of cheese. "What did you say when you should have said nothing?" she asks warningly.

Despite everything he almost smiles. They're the same people as they ever were. It's a reassuring thought. "I didn't think it was so bad," he begins, with a hint of the boy he was.

"Out with it."

"I was just repeating something you've said about him before."

She finishes off the slice of cheese, combing back through her memory for what she could possibly have said, and then her knife comes stabbing for another.

Sylvain surreptitiously moves his plate out of reach.

"Okay," she says. "I'm probably going to regret this, but what did I say?"

Something about her always makes him feel young again, and not in a fun way. "Just about how his life...uh. The way he lives now. How it. You know."

Her eyes widen in realisation. Now she remembers.

"How if you think about it, he, uh, actually he's quite…"

"No! You did not! You did _not _say that to him! Sylvain, what were you _thinking_?"__

"I was thinking it was a nice thing to say!"

"Are you stupid?"

"Apparently!" he shouts back. "It sounded so nice when you said it, and when he came I was so pleased to see him that I thought I should say something nice! Forgive me for thinking that's how it works!"

"How do you get so _close_ and just-?" She closes her eyes and frowns as though she has a headache, which Sylvain feels is laying it on a bit thick. "Sylvain, if you'd just said anything else - really, anything - then yes, that's how it works."

"You're the one who said it in the first place!"

"But not _to him_!" She picks up a bowl and helps herself to stewed noa fruit. "I can't believe you."

"You may as well believe me," says Sylvain, "because that's what happened." He looks out on the grounds and the scrubby little flowerbeds, the brown hunting birds picking flies out of the air. A wolfhound dozes in the sun, tail twitching in a dream hunt.

Ingrid freezes again suddenly. "Please say you didn't tell him I said it."

"Of course I didn't. I wanted all the credit."

She relaxes. "You're so stupid," she says, but affectionately. "I know you meant well. It's just…you know how he is."

"It was so long ago," says Sylvain, and immediately feels awful. "I mean, I know, but so much has happened since then."

"It's the one thing he could never get over."

Sylvain snorts. "Oh, please. He could never get over anything. He kept all his grudges lined up like his swords. He'd take them out every night and polish them."

"You know, he's never been back home since we left Garreg Mach the last time," says Ingrid. "I visited Lord Rodrigue regularly, and he'd always ask after him, and I had to say I just...didn't know. I hadn't seen him. And the _look_ on his face. It killed me, Sylvain."

"You shouldn't have had to be the one to do that."

"Well, there was no one else to do it."

"You always have to do the things nobody else wants to do." He's angry suddenly. "Even now. He decides to go off wandering and somehow you're the one who has to look Lord Rodrigue in the eye and tell him you don't know where his son is? How is that your job?"

"Sylvain."

"He had no right!"

"Sylvain."

"He shouldn't have gone like that without a word!"

"You're shouting," says Ingrid.

"I'm allowed to shout in my own house," he snaps. "He _left_ us. He left everything! What were we supposed to do?"

"I know."

"I thought I _had_ him." He clenches a fist and feels utterly powerless because he _had_ had him and lost him again with a handful of careless words. "I thought he was finally back."

"I thought he'd come back when they buried Lord Rodrigue," says Ingrid. "I thought it was enough."

"Did he even know?"

She shakes her head, shrugs. "I tried to reach him, near the end. I thought maybe if he knew his father was dying it would kick him into coming back. But I didn't even know where to start looking for him."

"He wouldn't have come," says Sylvain.

"You sound very sure." She's back at the noa fruit, making a face at its tartness and drowning it in creamy sauce. He knows that voice and that manner. She doesn't care what he thinks. She disagrees and she'll disagree till the end of the world.

"Well, do you think he would have?" he asks, just to hear her admit it.

"Yes. I like to think so."

He smiles. "You always did like a good fairytale ending."


	3. Blue Sea Moon, 1209 (II)

On the road, Felix regrets his haste. He just can't feel those ties that everyone else has. It's so easy to leave that he can do it without thinking, so he does it when he should be hesitating over the decision. He should have stewed over it long enough to realise that Sylvain saying something thoughtless isn't worth leaving like this. He doesn't know when he'll be back that way again.

The mercenary band aren't too far away, and don't seem surprised when they see him. He tells them it's time to move on and they're ready to go within the hour.

"You heard the lone wolf," they say to each other. "We're on the move again."

They think it's funny, and they think they're the only people who've ever thought it's funny. He, the lone wolf, and they, his adopted pack. As if they've tamed him. As if they're special, out of all the mercenary bands roaming Fódlan still.

Ah, he doesn't mind what they think. He'll stick with them while the going is good, while it suits him, and then he'll be off again. They like him, and maybe it's not so bad to be liked. They don't make a big thing of it, anyway, so let them pretend.

He thinks guiltily of Sylvain.

He'll go back one of these days, and this time he'll really try. He won't let Sylvain get under his skin so easily, whatever stupid things come out of his mouth.

There's a new mercenary in the band, an archer, who has absolutely the wrong idea of him. She thinks he's hiding a heart of gold tucked at the bottom of his sword sheath. She walks in step with him, gear on her back and bow slung over her shoulder.

"How was the job?" she asks.

He grunts.

Some of the others look at her disapprovingly. They think she should leave him alone. They're right.

"You were gone a while."

"No one was stopping you from moving on yourselves."

"I don't leave people behind," she says, because she's young and stupid and one of those.

"I do."

"Do you have family there?" she asks.

"Knock it off," says one of the others warningly.

The archer shoots him a look and turns back to Felix. "I heard you're from Faerghus originally. Is that true?"

"Have you heard that I cut pieces off people who ask too many questions? Because that's true."

She seems to take that as a challenge, but he ignores her and eventually she loses interest.

His pack is lighter without the bottles of wine in it, and the hours pass as easily as the hedges and wind-sculpted trees on the moors, the clusters of village houses nestled in the folds of the land. His step is light and he forgets about Sylvain altogether for long stretches of time, until he sees signposts pointing the way to Gautier, back the way they've come.

At some point they'll be passing along the edge of Fraldarius territory, and Felix knows he'll feel nothing.

"Anyone need anything mended or replaced?" someone asks. "May as well get it done now while we have the chance."

"Not me," says someone else. "I'm waiting for payday."

A chorus of agreement and criticism goes up at that. General approval of payday and all of the feasting that will be done when the money comes in, and cautionary tales of the mercenaries who planned to wait until payday to replace their equipment, only to be fatally betrayed by the gear they neglected before payday came. Many of these stories are apocryphal, most are variations on a theme, and Felix has heard every one of them before. It's not that he disapproves of them, but they're so obvious that anyone who needs such things to remember to take care of their gear has no business being anywhere near a weapon.

"Don't hold out for the money," he hears. "If you'd seen this village, I honestly don't know why any self-respecting bandits would target them in the first place."

"Why bother, then? We skip the job and find something better."

"You take what they pay you and you're thankful," says Felix, and they fall quiet at the sound of his voice. "Even if they pay you a hot meal. Even if they pay you a bed for the night."

He doesn't know why anyone becomes a mercenary these days. It's not a lucrative job anymore, not like it used to be during the war and in the turbulent years that followed. The only way to make it pay now is to hang around the borders of Fódlan and hope that Brigid will consider invading again. Everything else is keeping fleabitten thieves from fleabitten villages.

"The lone wolf does have a heart after all!"

"You heard him. Next blacksmith we pass, we'll offer a hot meal to pay for all our swords to be sharpened."

He lets them talk. They'll wear themselves out soon enough. And they stop talking about the poverty of the village, anyway.

It isn't until they stop to rest the carthorses and grab a bite to eat that he realises, with sinking heart, that Sylvain was exactly right about him.


	4. Blue Sea Moon, 1209 (I)

"You look _old_." They aren't supposed to be the first words out of Sylvain's mouth at such a long-awaited reunion, but he can't help it. All this time he's been thinking of Felix as the angry young man who parted ways with him as soon as they were out of Garreg Mach, as if Felix hasn't been getting older at exactly the same rate he has. Though it would be fair to say that he still thinks of himself as a young man too.

"No I don't," replies Felix, his sardonic tone unchanged.

"You most certainly do." He leans forward dramatically. "Is that a grey hair I see?" It is not. Felix was blessed with good genes. His father had barely begun to grey even on his deathbed. And it's an easy joke, contrasted to his own head. What little of his hair hasn't succumbed to silver is faded like a fox pelt left in the sun. He wants to say, _We've finally turned into our fathers_ , but that's the one thing he can never say aloud.

"I see the years haven't matured you at all."

Sylvain grins. Exactly what he wanted to hear. He stands aside. "Come on in."

Felix enters the Gautier household for the first time since the war. For the first time since he shed his surname and disinherited himself. He looks around, as though reacquainting himself with it all.

"Forgotten it all so quickly?" Sylvain asks. "Has it changed that much?"

"The opposite," says Felix. "It's exactly as I remember."

It's true that Sylvain hasn't bothered much with decorating since he inherited the old place, taking down a couple of particularly hideous tapestries his parents had been inexplicably fond of, moving some furniture around. Not much more than that. He doesn’t quite feel like it’s his yet, and though he has many complicated feelings about his childhood here, on the whole it was a happy one.

“My condolences for your father,” Felix adds.

Sylvain nods. He’s never known what to say to these well-wishes, so small in the face of the event. It’s been a few years now and he still doesn’t know.

“Is your mother still here?”

“She spends most of her time further south, nowadays. The cold gets too much for her.” She’s frail, since his father died. More and more often he realises when she’s speaking it’s not to _him_ , but to his father, or sometimes his brother, or to other people he doesn’t know.

“That’s a shame,” says Felix. “It’s been a long time since I last saw her.”

Sylvain makes a vaguely agreeing noise, but he didn’t tell her Felix was coming, and part of him is glad she isn’t here. Since Felix abandoned his title she’s had Opinions about him. To her, turning away from his inheritance, especially with his Major Crest, is a waste and a blasphemy.

It's a testament to how deeply this attitude to Crests is bred into the Gautier line that he understands where she's coming from, and a testament to his friendship with Felix that he has never given voice to these thoughts.

"I hope you don't mind the guest room," says Sylvain.

Felix gives him a suspicious look.

"It's up a lot of stairs. Are you sure you can manage it?"

Felix rolls his eyes. "Worry about yourself."

"Why, are you going to push me down them?"

"You know, I brought you wine, but if this is how you're going to behave..."

"Harmless jokes between old friends," says Sylvain breezily. "Get settled in and I'll have the fire roaring for you."

He's settled into his favourite armchair with the dogs curled at his feet by the time Felix comes down with a satchel that clinks invitingly.

"I don't know if it's the right vineyard," he says as he hands it over, "but I was passing by there anyway so I thought I'd pick up a bottle or two, because I know you like it, and you never leave the house."

"That border won't defend itself," says Sylvain. He doesn't mind the dig - it's true. Gautier lands are out of the way, and visitors are scarce. And there's the border with Sreng, which needs a close eye on it even in quiet times, if only to ensure it remains quiet.

"That's what I'm here for."

"It is indeed."

Sylvain fetches the wine glasses and uncorks the first bottle. He closes his eyes at the sharp scent of berries and spice. It smells like summer. _Real_ summer.

It reminds him of Garreg Mach.

He opens his eyes.

"What?" says Felix.

Sylvain shakes his head.

"Is it not good?"

"No, it's great, it's just…"

Felix is looking at him intently.

"How mad exactly will you be if I start talking about the old days?"

Felix relaxes visibly. "I accepted it as an inevitability when I agreed to come." He is different. The tone's the same, but he looks… Sylvain daren't even think the word 'softer', but Felix is undeniably less sharp-edged than he used to be.

"I can't believe how many years it's been," says Sylvain, tousling the soft ears of one of the wolfhounds at his feet to keep him in the here and now. "I hardly even think about the war anymore, but this, it just, it takes me right back. I think we must have been celebrating something, I don't know what, some battle, and there was a bottle of something that smelt just like this. Did Claude bring it, maybe?"

"Ignatz," says Felix quietly.

"Right, right. Merchant family. Of course. How did you _find_ this?"

"Mercenary secret," says Felix.

Sylvain pours the wine and they toast to mercenary secrets, because they're still being a little careful around each other after so long, each not quite sure who the other might have become while they've been apart, and they continue to be careful until the wine sinks in. The past remains the past; nothing leaps out at them from their memories. It's all happened and done.

"I'm sorry to bring you here on a job," Sylvain finds himself saying. "I should have invited you a long time ago without waiting for enough bandits to be an excuse. Not that they'll be any trouble for you."

"Don't apologise." Felix's face is all firelight and shadows. "Doing work for lords is the only way I can ever afford new swords."

"I thought mercenaries were supposed to travel light!"

"I don't bring them all with me."

Sylvain barks a laugh, and the dogs twitch in their sleep, growling lazy complaints. "Do you remember what you said," he says, knowing that he's skating on very thin ice here but too drunk to care, "when we left Garreg Mach that last time? And you told us all about your grand plans? And I asked you where your home would be now?"

"I remember," says Felix firmly, drawing a line under the subject with his tone and his gaze.

"You made out like you were so cool and you didn't care about anything, but I bet you had that line rehearsed. You could be as dramatic as Dorothea."

"People change," says Felix.

Sylvain finally stops laughing and leans back in the armchair. "Well," he says, "you did everything you said you would do."

Felix waits for the punchline.

Sylvain gives it to him. "And you can stop looking at me like that. I mean it. You told us you were going to do it, and you did it."

"Of course I did." He's still sitting straight, like a cat with its ears back. "You didn't approve, though."

"Oh, I thought you'd have got yourself killed long before now."

"And now?"

"Are you kidding? Having someone I can trust come take care of my bandit problems instead of being scammed by whatever mercenary company wants to milk my incredibly vast fortune?" Sylvain lifts his glass with a wink. "I only wish you'd become a merc sooner."

Felix allows himself a little self-satisfied smile, hidden behind his glass.

"The one thing," says Sylvain, rewarded by a guarded flash of Felix's eyes, "is the armour situation. Because I saw just how light you travelled here. And you are _not_ going out to meet my bandits dressed like that, if you'll pardon my saying so."

Felix takes a measured sip of wine. "It weighs me down."

"If you need some, then look." Sylvain gestures around him, framing the rest of the hall in his fingers. "I'm doing pretty well for myself here. I can afford it. Call it backpay for all the birthdays I've missed-"

"I'm fine," says Felix. "Thank you. The best defence is a good offence."

"You'll note they say 'best', and not 'only'. It would be different if you still had your Relic-"

"It's not my Relic."

The way he says it is clear, but it _was_ his, and it treated him so well. Sylvain can't imagine any other Fraldarius using it half so well. "It's a waste," says the wine more than him. He knows better than to say things like this.

But Felix is blunted by wine as well, and forgets to take offence. "It's a Fraldarius Relic. And I'm not a Fraldarius."

Felix may have given up his name, but that hasn't rid him of his Crest. If he picked up the Relic right now it would respond to him as strongly and immediately as it had in Garreg Mach. "I'll always think of it as yours."

"I can't change what you think." Felix finishes his glass, studying Sylvain over the rim, his eyes dark and his thoughts too, no doubt. “Where’s your Relic, anyway?" he asks suddenly. "I thought you’d have hung that fancy broom handle over the fireplace.”

Sylvain looks away. “Nah. All those memories. I didn’t want it. I gave it back to the professor pretty much as soon as the war was over.”

Felix scoffs. “The professor?”

“Yeah, who else-?”

“You still call her the _professor_? How old are you?”

“What else am I supposed to call her? What do _you_ call her?”

“...Shut up.” But he’s smiling. "And talk about waste, who's going to wield it once you're gone?"

"Oh, this is how it's going to be?"

"I'm just interested in the Gautier heir," says Felix. "I need to know if I should make the northern border one of my regular stops." He's heard something. Of that Sylvain has no doubt at all.

"There is no heir," says Sylvain carefully. "Yet."

"That's not what I heard." This is as close to a grin as Felix gets.

"Oh, there are...children. Just no heir. Yet."

"They say you're going to keep going until you make one you like the look of."

"I'll have you know all my children are beautiful." And before Felix can say it, he adds, "They take after their mothers."

He'll have to deal with that whole thorny problem of recognition and legitimacy at some point. The longer he leaves it, the worse it'll get. What he suspects will happen is that he'll just recognise them all, because anything else is politics, and he has no stomach for it. He doesn't want to talk about this right now, or think about it. He wishes he could leave everything behind like Felix did.

"Have you ever thought of just staying?" he asks, opening the last bottle with a satisfying pop of cork.

"Have you ever considered thinking before you open your mouth?" Felix retorts.

Sylvain grins. "I hope you never change." He'd only meant to think it, but after all the wine the lines between brain and mouth are blurred. "I like you like this."

Felix holds out his glass for a top-up, and Sylvain pours graciously, only spilling a little.

"You know what I was thinking?" he says, in a sudden rush of warmth.

He pours for himself, sets the bottle down almost on the dog's tail and clinks his glass too hard against Felix's.

"What were you thinking?" asks Felix.

"I was thinking, that your whole…" He waves his hand vaguely, "thing. You know. It's like, it's almost like, because you're riding around-"

"Walking around."

"Okay, you're walking around, saving people in distress… I mean, when you think about it, you're kind of living the ultimate knightly life."

Felix puts his glass down. "What?"

"Well, don't you think so? You're basically a knight. And a really great one."

Felix gets up quickly. "I'm going to bed."

Sylvain has said something wrong and he's not quite sure what. "But wine," he says, pointing at the bottle.

"You can finish it. Good night."

In the time it takes Sylvain to process, blinking, what has just happened, Felix has gone.


	5. Verdant Moon, 1201

The only sound is the crackling of the fire, and the spitting of the deer fat as it drips from the roasting haunch. Felix doesn't often eat so luxuriously but he's just off a job and he has a little time to breathe easily before tracking down more violence to fill his time and his mind. The weather is mild in the lands which used to belong to the Empire, and the hunting is good. He can treat himself to venison tonight.

The stars are out and the wind is soft. The Blue Sea Star twinkles like a cut sapphire against the velvet of the sky. Felix prods at the fire with a stick. Maybe tomorrow he'll find a blacksmith or a merchant. He could use a new sheath to replace the one that began to split the other day. He should be old enough to know better than this, he thinks. Old enough not to let his emotions get the better of him and handle his weapons so roughly. It isn't always that easy in battle, of course, but he holds himself to a higher standard nonetheless.

It's almost too quiet. He's almost too contented. The worries that followed him into his mercenary life have mostly faded with time, and when he finds himself too still he only feels a strange, disembodied tension rather than the sharp teeth of those old fears. Nevertheless, he's relieved to hear people approaching.

Mercenaries? he wonders, eyeing his sword lazily - there are more of them than of him - but as soon as they come into view he knows they aren't. An older lady (not so much older than you, he thinks) and a younger man, a son or nephew, perhaps. They're armed but not armoured. Hunters. And empty-handed. Felix can barely repress a curl of his lip.

He shifts a little closer to his fire and his venison, like a hawk mantling its kill, as if he can keep in the mouthwatering scent. Empty-handed hunters strolling in the night right by him, what a coincidence. He says nothing, stares obstinately into the flames.

"Good evening, friend," calls the woman, and it takes all of Felix's feral manners not to retort, " _I'm not your friend._ "

He grunts in reply.

"I see you've been lucky in the hunt today." He isn't looking but he can imagine how her eyes are drawn to the roasting haunch. Well, if she wanted some she should have caught one herself.

"Luck has nothing to do with it," he says.

"We all know that's not true," says the woman, still in that easy tone. "Luck has everything to do with it."

"And skill?" he asks dryly.

"The smallest part of success."

Felix scoffs. She'll have to do better than that if she wants to be any kind of example to the green kid she's dragging around with her.

"Is there space for two more at the table?" she asks.

He was hoping that she would be put off by his welcome, but now that she's asked, there are things that are not done. Refusing your meal to strangers is one of them. They could be gods in disguise, say the more credulous tales, or they could be faces in your future, friendly or unfriendly as you have made them. Felix isn't superstitious, but he isn't stupid, either. He gestures to the fire in half-hearted welcome.

The woman and her son, or whoever he is, sit. She introduces herself and him and Felix pays no notice. He doesn't offer his own name in return, and to her credit she doesn't press him.

"Mercenary?" she asks mildly.

He nods. No use hiding what he is. His weapons are laid out, his armour airing at the edge of the firelight.

"Your life must be boring around here."

"Not as boring as you might think." There may be relative, uneasy peace in this corner of the world, but what they lack in human monsters they make up for, at least until Felix's intervention, in wild reptile abominations, created by Edelgard or those who slither in the dark or Seiros herself for all he cares, and escaped to make their nest in any hollow, lonely place they could find.

"Did you come here to kill someone?" asks the boy with barely-disguised eagerness.

Felix laughs bitterly. He, of course, knows the secret. He knows what the monsters are. Perhaps 'someone' isn't so far off. "Bloodthirsty, aren't you?"

"Foolish is what he is," says the boy's mother sharply.

"You don't remember the war, do you?" he asks. "What does killing someone mean to you? Crime? Justice? Maybe revenge?"

"And to you it's a job," retorts the boy.

"That's right."

The woman helps herself to venison, displeased with the turn the conversation has taken. _She_ remembers the war. Anyone her age would. And her accent marks her out as a native of this area, and therefore one of Edelgard's subjects, as much as his own betrays his origins in old Faerghus. If she's as much a hunter as she seems, it wouldn't be too far to assume she might have been a soldier.

"I've been a hunter for over half my life," boasts the boy. "I've killed bigger than that." He tips his chin at the roasting deer meat.

"And has a deer ever killed someone you knew?" asks Felix. "Has a deer ever spoken to you? Has a deer ever _hated_ you?"

He knew people younger than this boy who fought and were killed in the war. He hears, unbidden and unwelcome in his mind, his own voice, whispering, _Could I have saved him?_ and viciously thrusts it down, back into the blackness.

"There's no shame in hunting deer," he says roughly.

The woman passes him a tin plate loaded with steaming venison. She isn't smiling but her eyes are grateful.

The boy sits, sullen and silent once more.

"Do you live around here?" Felix asks her. He needs to talk about something else.

"Not so far." She passes the boy his own plate and lets him take out his mood on the meal. "We're going to pack up and move on soon, though. I have a sister in the old Faerghus lands." She doesn't say anything about his accent, but she looks at him with renewed interest.

"The hunting's not as good there as it is here," Felix replies.

"Maybe I'll take up something else. It's never too late to learn something new."

Is that directed at him? Is that a hopeful look in her eye or just stray glints of firelight?

"Why now?" he asks, ignoring it.

"Why not? Old Lord Fraldarius is dead, and my sister says the new Lord seems kinder inclined towards those of us who hail from these lands. We're going to try our luck. It's rich territory. Perhaps we can make something of ourselves."

_What do you mean, he's dead?_ Felix swallows the words along with his shock. He can't let slip that connection. He has no right to it now anyway. He felt nothing to warn him of Lord Rodrigue's death, no moment of loss, no lightness or distance or absence. How could he not have felt anything?

"Have you ever been?"

"A long time ago," he says. "I didn't much care for it."

She laughs to hide her disappointment. "Well, anywhere a mercenary can't be happy will make a good home for me."

"I hope it does," he says.


	6. Harpstring Moon, 1196

The reunion begins tentatively, nobody quite sure what to do. The last time most of them saw each other was on a battlefield or riding in the opposite direction away from Garreg Mach.

Sylvain drifts through his old classmates with a glass in his hand. Who thought this was a good idea? What can they possibly say to each other? _Hey, glad you're still alive. Remember the war? Good times._ It could be any old noble event, Hilda having insisted on hosting the reunion in her home castle in Goneril, and having spared no expense with the decoration and catering.

He tries not to think about the faces which aren't there. Felix isn't there, after all, but that's just because he didn't want to be found. The same could be true of the others.

Lorenz is dressed more finely than ever and wears his hair in a different style than he did at school, though equally ridiculous, to hide the scar he took at Derdriu. Raphael and Ignatz are inseparable, and Marianne keeps to the wall, harangued by Hilda. Even Claude showed his face from whichever corner of Almyra he's been hiding it in, though not for long, and he's already taken to his wyvern and left them. Sylvain doesn't blame him. This whole idea just seems so strange to him. Such a normal rite of passage for the graduates of the Officers Academy, so utterly bizarre for the veterans of a war.

He has no idea how he could have missed Dedue, hulking over the others, looking more out of place than any of them, and even less of an idea how anyone managed to contact him and convince him to come.

It's been years and he still feels like a traitor to the Blue Lions. He deftly lifts a glass of wine from a servant's tray and makes his way over, the empty glass still in his other hand.

"Come here often?" he says, handing Dedue the full glass.

"No," replies Dedue. He clearly hasn't changed. "I spend my time in Duscur, helping to rebuild my homeland."

Sylvain nods and lets the joke go. It's been a while since he's had to do it, but it comes right back to him. "How's it going?"

"Progress is slow, but I am not unhappy with it."

"Good. That's good." It wouldn't be any more awkward if the ghost of Dimitri himself were here, looking Sylvain in the eye and asking him to justify his decisions. "If there's ever anything Gautier can do to help, let me know."

Dedue takes the wine glass at last from Sylvain's outstretched hand. "I don't believe your services will be required."

Sylvain takes a sip to hide a quirk of a smile, looking slyly up at Dedue. "It's good to be independent but it won't make you many friends."

Dedue studies him. "You think it will harm us politically." He was never one for questions.

"Well, okay, not _harm_ you, but I think some visible cooperation with an old Faerghus family will _help_ you politically."

"I see." Dedue's gaze doesn't waver, and Sylvain pretends he's holding up under its weight. "I am a simple man, the son of a simple family-"

"You're anything but simple."

"-and I wasn't made for politics. You must forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive," Sylvain blusters, suddenly embarrassed. "You can stop all that-"

To his immense relief, Ingrid makes her way to them, thus forestalling any possibility that other forgivenesses might need to be demanded. The relief doesn't last long. Sylvain has never had much of an issue with the people of Duscur, but Ingrid has always nursed her grudges well.

"Good evening," she says, somewhat stiffly.

Sylvain braces himself to be the mediator and wishes he hadn't spent all his time sipping wine to stave off the awkwardness of the event.

Dedue gives a little nod. "Thank you for the invitation."

_The what?_

Ingrid sees the look on his face, and her cheeks flush red. "Well, I knew _you_ weren't going to do the decent thing," she says, nettled, to Sylvain.

"You caught me," he admits, taking another ill-judged draught of wine.

"I thought it would be nice to have someone else here who...understands us a little more."

"We were not always on the same side," says Sylvain delicately. "And Dedue, for that we're sorry…"

"We changed classes at school," interrupts Ingrid. "We didn't know we were choosing sides in a war."

And yet they hadn't changed back when it became clear that that was exactly what they had inadvertently done. He doesn't say it and Ingrid bumbles on.

"We had nothing to do with what happened to Dimitri…"

"I know," says Dedue.

"But we weren't able to save him, either," adds Sylvain, giving voice to the uncomfortable truth. Weren't able to, or didn't try hard enough? The Sylvain who fought in the war is a stranger to him. He remembers everything being ferociously urgent, he remembers confusion and terror and brief wild tornadoes of fierce joy and blizzards of despair, but it's all blended into an indistinguishable parade of colour and feeling. Had they been hard pressed when Dimitri had fallen? He doesn't know anymore. And they hadn't been able to talk much about it at the time, the Golden Deer having had other priorities. They had had their ideas of Dimitri as a person, a ruler, a warrior, but they hadn't known him _before_ all that the way Sylvain and Ingrid had. And yes, Felix too.

Where is Felix?

"I know we can't ask forgiveness," says Ingrid. "It's...it's done and we can't- we have to…"

If he'd known it would be like this, Sylvain wouldn't have come.

Dedue nods slowly.

"But you were always there for him - yes, always - and you did everything you could, and I wanted to, well, to thank you."

Sylvain mutters some agreeing sound to show that he's behind her in this sentiment though he wishes they could have spoken about this privately instead, without having to reveal their complicated guilt in Dedue's immense presence.

"I did what was expected of me," says Dedue. "Though I failed."

"We all failed, then," mutters Sylvain.

"And yet there is peace."

"So they keep telling us." Why doesn't it feel like peace? Why does it feel almost worse than fighting? When he was part of an army he knew who he was and where he was supposed to be, and between the horrors was...something. Excitement? Purpose? Probably just the constant low-level buzz of fear misinterpreted by his stupid, immature brain. But they'd laughed sometimes, and feasted too.

"We did what we could," adds Ingrid stubbornly.

"What are you saying?" Sylvain asks her at last.

She frowns at him. "What are _you_ saying?"

"Why did you - sorry, Dedue - why did you invite him? Are you guilty or not? Did we do our best or did we not try hard enough?"

"Sylvain-"

The wine is talking, and the wine has no tact. "What do you want? Do you want to be told you're a bad person? A bad subject? A bad knight? A bad friend? Or do you want to be consoled? Which is it-?"

"I don't know!" she screams at him.

A little bubble of silence pops open around them. The music plays on.

He hears her in his mind, _Are you happy?_ and she's glaring at him like a snowcat caught in a trap that knows you could never have bested it in a fair fight, that this underhanded trick is the only way you can kill it.

"I don't _know_!" she says again, quieter but somehow more desperate, "and I thought it might be nice to talk to someone who understands what it is to not know!"

He doesn't even manage to rearrange his face in the right configuration of _I'm sorry, what?_ before she continues.

"We can't all know everything!"

Things are starting to fall into a more familiar pattern. A girl is yelling at him. People are staring. This is a normal thing in Sylvain's life. "I don't think I've ever claimed to know anything in my life," he says, because this is the performance part, where if you're lucky you can nip all this in the bud, if you make the right joke and deflate the tension, if you're talking to literally anyone but Ingrid the humourless, if the problem is what a worthless dog you are as a love prospect and not that your friend is dead and you don't know if it's your fault or not.

“Oh, sure,” she says bitterly. “Just laugh it off, because nothing matters, right? Just chase around the shiny little voice in your head and screw the rest of us, screw the consequences, screw the fact that we might have been able to save him if we’d just done something different!”

The glass is too empty in his hand and there’s no one around to fill it up for him. He clenches a fist around the stem. “ _But we didn’t._ ” He barely recognises his own voice, twisted and low.

Something is shifting and moving in the crowd around them, as everyone settles in to watch the fight. Some things haven’t changed since their school days.

Ingrid’s hands are in fists too. “And it’s just that simple, isn’t it?” she demands, and as he’s thinking, Shit, I’m going to have to fight her, aren’t I? she spins around in a swing of blonde plaits pinned as tightly as her temper and almost barges into Dedue in her rush to be away. She apologises in a sullen mutter but shoves her way through regardless, head down.

Sylvain is left alone in the middle of it all, not understanding her at all. He looks at Dedue, who shows no emotion.

“I’m sorry,” he manages at last. “I didn’t mean that to… I don’t know what… I’m sorry.” He reaches up to scratch at the nape of his neck, an impulsive embarrassed habit, but the glass is still in his hand and scatters cold drops of wine dregs on his shoulders and round about him. He fights the urge to fling the glass to the ground.

The movement of the crowd resolves into Hilda. “Hey,” she says, dodging around shoulders and craning her neck to get a good view. “What’s-? Oh. You.”

Sylvain puts on his best apologetic, whoops-I-guess-I’m-just-incorrigible-huh expression, and gives an exaggerated shrug.

The worry drains from her eyes. She’s done up to the nines today, all ruffles and fabrics that shimmer in a costly fashion, wearing a jewelled axe brooch at her chest as a cheeky reminder of the old days. “I should have known you’d still be a troublemaker,” she says.

“You knew who I was when you invited me.”

“Is she okay?” Hilda asks.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine. You know Ingrid. Tough as wyvern hide. Anyway, this wine is exquisite.” He holds up his empty glass. “You got any more?”

Relieved that there’s no lasting damage done to her party, HIlda relaxes back into her hostess role. “Are you kidding? We have _barrels_ left. Please, have more. You’ll be doing me a favour. Here, let me get you some.”

The tension doesn’t quite go out of Sylvain’s shoulders until there’s a full glass of wine in his hand.

Dedue is watching him like a reminder of all the things he never did.

He turns away and drains the glass.


	7. Great Tree Moon, 1190

The world is bigger than he thought it was.

Felix considers himself pretty well-travelled, all things considered, given all the traipsing across country he did during the war, but those journeys had always been from A to B, a spear-thrust out of the monastery and quickly back in again when their mission was done. He was always surrounded by city walls or castle walls or Alliance troops.

Now he’s alone and he has nowhere he needs to be, and it turns out the world is fucking huge. It infuriates him, just how big it is. He wants to shout at it. He wants to fight it. He’s pretty sure he’d win, given the state most of it’s in now, with cities rebuilding and seemingly every barn in Fódlan full of vagabond ex-soldiers begging a bed for the night.

Not him. He’ll sleep outside rather than lower himself to that.

The inns grow emptier the further south he goes, once he gets off the roads to Enbarr. Things seem peaceful, almost; fertile, wealthy towns nestled in vivid greenery and lush fields of ripening crops.

Not much for a mercenary to do here, perhaps, but if he pushes on a little further he’ll get to the coast, and Brigid, and Dagda, which are only names to him right now but exist somewhere across the water. The world is gigantic. He hates it. He wants to see all of it. He wants to swallow it whole.

He’s starting to get a feel for the places where the mercenaries go to exchange tips and meet old friends. Inns that are a little out of the way, a little worse for wear. The ones with the loudest voices drifting out of the doorways, whose windows are lit up into the deepest parts of the night.

And he’s used to introducing himself as just Felix, no bullshit House names, no baggage, no history. No money either, but he can live off little and earn more when he needs it. He’s been waiting for this, or some part of him has, for years. It feels _right_ to step into some tavern he’s never seen in his life, in the heart of what used to be the Adrestian Empire, and pay for a drink and a hot meal with coins he earned by flushing out a monster nest miles away. This is perhaps who he’s always been, hidden in the marble block of the Fraldarius family, and now he’s chiselled himself out and left that name behind him in chips and shards on the ground, himself at last.

The other mercenaries nod when he passes, though he doesn’t recognise any of them. This is good. They didn’t always acknowledge him like this. This is just as earned as his money is.

“Hey, stranger,” says an older woman from a table in the corner, flanked by a pair of what look like magic users. He can tell by the way they hold their hands, easy and casual like familiar weapons. “You looking for friends?”

Felix eyes her warily. “I work alone.”

“Sure you do. But how about some company while you eat? No strings attached.”

He’d still rather eat alone, but he’s learned the hard way over these months that it doesn’t pay to make enemies for no reason, especially in a strange place, so he sits with them.  
The woman who called to him moves her unstrung bow out of the way, leaning it against the wall like a cane. It makes Felix itch. He wants to oil it and wrap it and put it somewhere cool and dry.

“How do you keep a bow like that in this climate?” he asks. Maybe it’s a weird thing to open with. Whatever. Better weird than rude.

She glances at her weapon, amused. “By not being too precious about it, mostly.”

He’s biting his tongue but a little snort escapes him anyway. _Stupid,_ he thinks at himself. It doesn’t matter that she’s being stupid too.

To his surprise, and not necessarily to his liking, she laughs, and even her magic user friends smile at each other. “Yeah, I used to be like you,” she says. “You new at this?”

“Not as new as you’d think,” he retorts.

She raises her hands. “Hey, no judgement. We all gotta start somewhere. And you haven’t made a bad start for yourself, if you’re who I think you are.”

“And who do you think I am?” he asks, more coldly than he needs to in order to disguise the unpleasant leap of nerves in his throat.

“I can’t imagine there are many lone wolf cubs out there with more than one Zoltan at their hips.”

He clenches his fist to stop himself from touching his swords. He didn’t think someone who treated their longbow like a walking staff would be able to recognise good smith work.

“Felix, right?” asks one of the magic users with an easy smile.

“The mysterious Felix,” adds the other, “who sprang from nowhere.”

“Or maybe he has ties to Garreg Mach?”

Rage bristles over his scalp. “Do I look like-?”

“Or Faerghus?”

He gets up. “Okay, that’s enough. Enjoy your night, I’m-”

“Hey, hey, sit down,” says the mercenary. “We’re not here to interrogate you. Don’t answer. Doesn’t bother us. Right, Suri? Luzia?”

“Sure.”

“Not at all.”

He sits back down, mostly because he doesn’t want them to know he’s riled up. He doesn’t want to show weakness.

“Where are you headed, Felix?” asks the mercenary.

He isn’t sure he likes being called by name. He should have come up with something new when he left home. “Nowhere in particular, whoever you are.”

“Marjut.”

He doesn’t say anything. His answer hasn’t changed just because she’s finally introduced himself.

“Where have you come from?” asks Suri or Luzia, he doesn’t know or care which.

“The old Hresvelg lands. Not that you’re interrogating me or anything.”

“If you think this is an interrogation,” says Marjut, “you weren’t around during the Dagda-Brigid War.”

He doesn’t want to play these games anymore.

She tries again. “Look. We’ve got a tip to give you, if you want it.”

Why couldn’t they have just said that in the first place? Why is it always this wink-wink nudge-nudge bullshit, where everyone pretends they’re in an opera and they’ve memorised all the songs? And “If you want it”? How is he supposed to know if he wants it? He hates working with people. One day, he promises himself, he’ll work himself into a situation where he will never have to work with other people again. “What is it?” he asks at last.

“How would you feel,” begins Suri-or-Luzia, “about turning around and heading back up north?”

“There’s a job,” says Marjut, who seems to understand more than the other two how tiresome he finds all this coyness. “Big job. Bigger pay. And before you ask, yes, we are interested, but we need some extra muscle, and we think you could be pretty good for our team.”

The old Felix, which is to say, the younger Felix, would have snapped back something along the lines of, “I’m not much of a team player,” but new Felix, which is to say older Felix, lets his curiosity take a cautious step forward, a fox sniffing the air. “What kind of job?” he asks grudgingly.

“Monsters,” says Marjut. “Sounds like your thing, no?”

He allows himself a slight nod. He’s good at monsters. Not many people have had his experience. And Dagda will still be there when he’s done.

“The catch is that we have to leave pretty much at first light,” says Marjut. “We aren’t the only people who've heard the call, and it’s a long way to Fraldarius territory.”

“What?” The word slips out like something dropped, with the inevitability of gravity.

“Fraldarius,” says Marjut. “One of the big Faerghus regions. All hills and rocks.”

He can’t say anything. He doesn’t know how to play this. Are they fucking with him? Do they know who he is? Have they known from the start? He should have changed his name, cut his hair, changed his stupid treacherous _face_ with his father’s colouring, his father’s features.

“You know it?” asks Luzia-or-Suri.

He isn’t hungry or thirsty anymore. He pushes his chair out and gets to his feet, dizzy with thoughts. “I can’t help you,” he says.

“Hey,” says Marjut, “I haven’t even told you how much the old bird in the castle is offering to pay.”

“I don’t care.” It’s a trap. His father trying to lure him back. He won’t go near it.

He stays at a different inn that night, with a chair pushed up against the door, and in the first light of morning he looks out of the window at streets blanketed in mist. If the other mercenaries have all left to go to Fraldarius he can’t see them, and they can’t see him either, just another pale face at the window.


	8. Horsebow Moon, 1186

Sylvain doesn’t think much about the future, as a rule, but his days at the Officer’s Academy have really outdone anything he could possibly have imagined. He wasn’t expecting much out of it - mostly a blank, maybe some classes? Some encounters with exotic ladies from far-flung corners of the continent? Nothing like this feeling, beginnings and endings heavy in the air and in the scents of the sun-heavy leaves. Five years later.

At least this time the monastery is… Well, okay, not intact, but at least no less intact than it was when he came back last year. Last time he left during the opening bars of a war, and today he is leaving amid its dying echoes.

“What are you gonna do now?” he asks Ingrid as they wait in the stableyard.

“What do you mean? Like, ever? With my whole life?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugs. “I haven’t really had the chance to think about it.”

The stablehand brings out Ingrid’s horse, all brushed and buffed to a rich shine, well-fed and saddled as though it has spent its life rolling around fields and not galloping to war.

Ingrid takes the reins and deposits a kiss on the horse’s nose. “I can’t imagine we’ll be left to our own devices for long, though.”

“You think so?” asks Sylvain.

“Why not? The world hasn’t ended. There’s still plenty to do.” She brushes dust from her horse’s saddle.

“Maybe for you, pressed up against the Alliance,” he says. He can’t stop thinking of them like that, though the borders between the three countries have been beaten into the ground. Still, he can’t imagine Gautier even noticed there was a war on. “Wait,” he says, in a sudden spike of realisation, “now that there’s no… no king, and no _kingdom_ …”

Ingrid turns from her horse and her eyes seem to flash at him. “He can try to take our lands,” she says darkly.

He raises an eyebrow at her. She’s always been one for winding herself up into a fury over an imaginary conversation.

She sighs at his look, and the fire goes out of her eyes. “But I don’t think he will. I don’t think we’re going to see much more of him from now on. And the professor would _never_. Not when we fought alongside the Alliance. We’re Golden Deer, remember. Technically.”

Sylvain laughs. “Yeah, technically.”

“And officially. Which has got to count for something. Anyway, I’m going to get out of here. I’ll wait for you at the gates?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you there,” says Sylvain, as if they;re going out forging or fishing or for a supply run, and very much not as if they’re leaving the monastery for the last time. The very last time. Hopefully? Yes, but sadly, too.

Ingrid leads her horse out of the stableyard and squeezes Sylvain’s shoulder as she passes him. He musters up a grin for her.

He’s left to fidget on his own for a while, wondering whether they’ve lost his horse somewhere in the stables, when Felix comes padding up behind him, already wearing a fur-collared coat in anticipation of the spring gales that tear through the mountain passes.

“I guess we won’t be needing to practise our ambush techniques anymore, will we?” says Sylvain, a little louder than usual to mask the hammering of his heart at the sight of Felix’s face so suddenly at his shoulder.

“Won’t we?” asks Felix.

“We won’t,” says Sylvain, moving surreptitiously around so that Felix is no longer in his blind spot and trying not to think about the last sight so many people have seen in their lives over the last year. “We will not. No more of that.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Felix.

He’s sort of smiling, or half-smiling anyway, but there’s something about his tone that Sylvain can’t quite put his finger on, and he doesn’t like that because he’s a connoisseur of all the subtle shades of Felix’s silences. It seems singularly unfair that Felix should outfox him now, in the final hours, that somewhere in his thick head he should stumble across a new emotion, right before they’re about to part ways and Sylvain won’t be able to keep an eye on him in case it doesn’t agree with him.

“You got any plans for when you get home?” Sylvain asks innocently.

And now Felix really is smiling and Sylvain doesn’t like this at all. “No.”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he gives a grunt of acknowledgement, and the stablehand finally appears with Sylvain’s horse and saves him from having to say anything further. He thanks the stablehand and turns to Felix. “You all packed and ready?”

Felix nods.

“Ingrid said she’d meet us at the gates.”

“She’s going to pace a hole in the ground if you don’t hurry up.”

Sylvain rolls his eyes and begins to lead his horse out of the yard. Last time he’ll ever see the stableyard. Last time he’ll ever wave to the stablehand. “I don’t know why you’re all so eager to go home.”

The last time he’ll see the wheelbarrows for the hay and manure, the last time he’ll almost trip over one of the monastery cats. He’ll never do any of this again.

“Sylvain, I’m-” Felix breaks off.

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“Uh, no? Sylvain, you’re what?”

Felix glances at the ground. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If you don’t tell me, you know Ingrid’s gonna drag it out of you.”

“I said forget it.”

“You are so bad at this,” says Sylvain.

“Shut up.”

It’s not like Sylvain wants to make the journey home tangled up in bickering, so he lets Felix sweat for a while when they meet up with Ingrid and set off. He keeps turning to watch Garreg Mach get smaller and smaller behind them, and he doesn’t know why he’s getting so sentimental about it all. It isn’t the end of his life.

Ingrid’s in pretty high spirits, her plaits swaying in the fresh wind and her hood down. “I think the first thing I’m going to do when I get home is eat-”

Sylvain snorts.

“What?”

“Of course the first thing you’re going to do is eat,” he says. “And the second thing, and the third…”

“Well, what are _you_ going to do?”

“Me?” He looks back, but he can’t see Garreg Mach anymore, not the Goddess Tower or the high ruined viaducts with their arches standing delicate as lace between mountain peaks. Already it’s fading from his reality. Already it’s easier. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is have a bath and miss the Garreg Mach bathhouse.”

Ingrid groans. “Oh, no, don’t remind me.”

“I’ll never be able to be happy again with a mountain spring bath.”

“Wait, why not build your own bathhouse in Gautier? That would give you something to do.”

“Huh. I never thought about that.”

“What about you, Felix?” Ingrid asks. “What are you going to do when you get home?”

Felix has been following them silently all this way. He looks at them now, long and steady. And then he says, “I’m not going home.”

Sylvain laughs, nervously.

Ingrid flares up like kindling. “What?”

The unreadable emotion on his face flattens out into much more Felix-like insolence. “I said I’m not going home.”

“Of course you’re going home,” says Ingrid. “Where else would you go?”

“I’m going to be a mercenary.”

“You can’t!”

“I can.”

“Felix,” says Sylvain, “come on…”

“Who’s going to hire the heir to House Fraldarius to chase bandits out of their barn?” snaps Ingrid.

Sylvain sees the answer unveiled before him before Felix even says it.

“I’m no longer the heir to House Fraldarius. I’m giving up my name and title.”

There’s no convincing him, Sylvain sees. As far as Felix is concerned, the ties are already cut. He wonders if Lord Fraldarius knows. “Who’s going to tell your dad?”

“I don’t care.”

Sylvain laughs again, frustrated this time. “Well, yeah, of course _you_ don’t care, because it’s not gonna be you, is it? You haven’t told him, have you?”

“I told you to forget it.”

Sylvain would like nothing more than to get off his horse, drag Felix from his and shake some sense into him. “What is _wrong_ with you? How are you going to live? _Where_ are you going to live?”

Felix shrugs. “My home will be where my sword is.”


	9. Verdant Rain Moon, 1220

The arrow in his side is slowing him down, and when the axe bites through his shoulder and lays him open, Felix knows it's over.

They leave him where he falls to gasp out the rest of his life in the mud. One of those sudden southern rainstorms hit during the fight, steamed up the day like a sauna. Lost visibility. Idiot. Never come south of Enbarr during the Verdant Rain Moon.

He won't again.

_Get up_ , he thinks.

Not now. When it's easier. He can barely think outside his own body. Everything hurts. He's never hurt like this before. No close call was ever so bad. Hardly close at all, now that he's here on the other side of it. He didn't know anything back then. Certainly not pain.

The fighting is over and he can't get up.

He's being dragged over the ground and he can't get up. The archer. Her grip on him slips.

"Don't." His voice is a rough, low growl. He sounds terrible. He's glad he can't see himself.

Her hands on him again. "I don't leave people behind. I'm going to get you to-"

"Don't...waste...my _time_."

She lets him go.

"Did we...get them?" Every word a battle. Except fighting is easier than this. Fighting on a full stomach and good sleep, on his own terms and with his own sword.

"We did." He can hardly see her in the rain but she sounds sad, cloying, _warm_ , and that annoys him. He doesn't have time to comfort some crying kid.

He has to muster all his energy to move, pats the sheath of his sword clumsily, making it rattle. His body doesn't like this. Something feels torn in his chest. Fresh warmth spreads under his armour.

Something butts against his hand. His sword. She's brought him his sword. His fingers open instinctively and he takes hold of it. His hand forms the right shape without his having to think about it; even now he can hold a sword correctly, when everything else is failing.

"Send it," he manages, voice strained.

"Your sword?"

He nods, unable to speak.

"Where?" asks the archer. She sniffs.

"Margrave…" He has to hold onto the word until the wave breaks and his body obeys. "...Gautier." She'd better be listening. He'd better be comprehensible. He doesn't know if he can manage it again. "Say it."

"Margrave…" She pauses, and he'll do it, he'll dredge up some demon energy from somewhere and beat it into her if he has to, but he doesn't have to. "Gautier?" As if the name is unfamiliar. "In Faerghus?"

He nods again. She knows. She’s been in his territory before.

"Is there a message?"

He shakes his head weakly.

"Okay. I'll get it there."

He lets go of a weight. And the archer is gone and the rain has stopped and the sky is blue, blue, blue, as blue as winter, as blue as summer, as blue as flowers and flags and cloaks and eyes and old, old memories, and the blue is him, and he is the blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you.
> 
> And especially thank you Gemma, who's responsible for this <3


End file.
